


something to mend

by butterflysky



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Batfamily (DCU), Bruce Wayne is Bad at Feelings, Bruce Wayne is a Bad Parent, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Bonding, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jason Todd is Bad at Feelings, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence, but he's good at being angry??, but he's trying his very best, extremely reluctant, he can be both!!!, post utrh, rated for language and a teeny bit of violence and self-destructive behaviour, two sad bats try to mend their broken relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26718406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterflysky/pseuds/butterflysky
Summary: When someone sits across from Jason, he hardly notices he’s so absorbed in the pages before him. But he notices when a hand reaches for the sugar next to him, and then he looks up, and he’s so shocked he can’t think of a single thing to say.“Jason,” Bruce says evenly. Jason just stares.(Or: Bruce and Jason attempt to mend their relationship in the immediate aftermath of Under the Red Hood, one meeting at a time.)
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 31
Kudos: 364





	something to mend

It’s been a month since that day, and Jason’s neck has healed until what used to be an ugly mar on his skin is now just a thin, pink line. 

Sometimes Jason traces the length of it, feels the raised line, and lets himself think about what happened. 

How Bruce, the man who was supposed to be his _father,_ chose the clown — Jason's _murderer_ — over him. 

And then he gets angry. Sometimes he smashes up whatever shitty warehouse he’s holed up in, sometimes he goes to a bar and drinks himself stupid, sometimes he starts a fight with a gang of thugs he knows he can’t win.

It’s been about a week since the last time he did something like that, and Jason’s starting to feel restless, uneasy. The memories are rising up in his mind in a tidal wave of Lazarus green. 

It’s like he can feel the batarang slicing into his neck all over again. 

That morning he wakes up and thinks maybe today he’ll try being kind to himself. It’s supposed to help, right? So he showers and dresses in something that isn’t his Red Hood gear, heads outside and goes to a diner for breakfast. 

It’s not really working. His thoughts are still loud and unwelcome in his head. 

He sits and orders some pancakes and a black coffee. There’s a paperback in his jacket pocket, an old copy of Persuasion. He’s read it before, of course, but he’s indulging himself today. 

And that’s how Bruce finds him. 

When someone sits across from him, he hardly notices he’s so absorbed in the pages before him. But he notices when a hand reaches for the sugar next to him, and then he looks up, and he’s so shocked he can’t think of a single thing to say. 

“Jason,” Bruce says evenly. Jason just stares.

He’s in a suit, as if he’s on his way to Wayne Enterprises. He’s got his human mask on, which means he looks weirdly sad.

Jason’s furious. That’s it, then. His day ruined. The one day he was supposed to do only nice things, not feel this awful black-green rage that’s rising behind his eyes already. 

Jason stands abruptly. He’s going to leave, pretend this didn’t happen, but Bruce’s hand grabs him by the wrist. 

“Stay. Please.”

“No,” Jason hisses, jerking himself free. “We’re _done._ ”

He storms away, and it isn’t until he’s got to the door that he realizes he’s left Persuasion behind. When he looks over his shoulder, Bruce has picked it up and is paging through it. 

That tidal wave of anger ebbs, replaced by something cold and sickening. Jason pushes through the diner’s door before it can change into something else. 

Jason avoids the diner for two weeks. He doesn’t really think he’s avoiding it, since he’s never planning on going back.

He starts some more fights he has no hope of winning, gets blackout drunk a few more times, and then a kind of morbid curiosity starts to creep through him. 

Why had Bruce asked him to stay? What more was there they could even talk about? They’d said everything they ever could. 

Hadn’t they?

Late at night, when he’s laying awake, aching all over from another fight, he imagines Bruce was going to tell him he was right. That he should never have thrown that batarang, that he should’ve let Jason pull the trigger. 

It’s stupid, so stupid it almost makes him cry from frustration. There’s no way Bruce would ever say that to him, he knows that now. 

But what _had_ he wanted to say?

It’s that question that brings him back to the diner. 

He hasn’t got a paperback this time, which means he sees the moment Bruce Wayne walks inside. 

They catch eyes. Bruce pauses, then goes to the counter, orders a coffee, and walks to Jason’s table. 

“May I?” he asks. 

Jason says nothing, but nods once. 

Bruce sits opposite him. 

“You left this behind,” Bruce says, when they’ve watched each other in silence for long enough. He slides Jason’s copy of Persuasion across the table, and Jason hesitates for just a moment before he picks it up. 

“You’ve been carrying this around?” he asks, and looks up in time to see Bruce nod. 

“I’ve been…coming here every morning.”

Jason looks down, at the book, rubbing his thumb across the cover for something to do. “That’s a lot of sugar,” he manages. 

When he looks back up, Bruce is looking sadly at him. 

“Don’t give me that,” Jason says scornfully. “You—”

“Jason,” Bruce interrupts, and Jason shuts his mouth. Here it is, then. “I know what you’ve done. I saw what the Red Hood did to Gotham.”

Jason’s hands are fisting on the table. “What the hell is your point?”

“And then I saw you here, eating pancakes and reading one of your favorite books.” Bruce looks down, studies the table. “And I thought…”

“You thought _what?_ ” Jason snaps. “That I’m not just a psychopathic murderer after all?”

Bruce winces. “You’re my son.”

“I am _not,_ ” Jason says, so furious he can hardly think. “I wasn’t your son in that room with the clown, and I’m not now. We’re _done._ ”

“Jason—” Bruce tries, but Jason’s already on his way out. 

When he gets back to his safehouse, he realizes he forgot his damn book again. 

Jason lays awake and thinks of Bruce going to the diner every day. 

What the hell does he want from Jason, anyway? For him to go back to how he’d been when he was 15? Before Robin and everything _good_ got beaten out of him with a crowbar?

Probably, Jason decides, and pulls the covers over his head. 

He doesn’t know why he goes back to the diner again. 

_You’re my son._ It’s been running through his head on repeat. 

This time, when Bruce sits down, Jason speaks first. 

“Do you have my book?”

Bruce hesitates, then hands it over. “Try not to forget it, this time.”

Jason puts it safely in his jacket pocket. “Right.”

They watch each other. 

Bruce breaks first to stir his coffee. “You’ve been keeping well?”

Jason sees red for the briefest moment. “Yeah, some guy sliced my neck open with a batarang, but apart from that, I’ve been just _swell_.”

Bruce whips his head up to look at him, and Jason takes a vicious joy in jerking his shirt collar down to show off his new scar. He’s lost count of how many he has now.

“You’ve got a black eye,” Bruce says flatly, when Jason has let his shirt go. 

Jason touches the bruised skin, surprised. “This? It’s nothing. Patrol.”

“Hm.”

Jason rips off a corner of the napkin under his coffee and rolls it into a ball. “Was that it?”

Bruce sighs through his nose loud enough for Jason to hear. “I don’t know how to talk to you anymore.”

Jason could _punch_ him, but he stays seated with some difficulty. “Am I supposed to tell you how?”

“Alfred told me to ask questions.”

_Alfred_. Jason feels sick. What he wouldn’t give to go back to a sunlit afternoon helping Alfred bake a cake in the manor’s huge kitchen, just one last time. 

“Questions,” Jason repeats. 

“Yes. How have you…been doing?”

Jason can’t believe this. “I’ve been better.”

They stare at each other again. 

“You still read.”

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

Jason sighs, drains his coffee, and stands. “That’s that then.”

“Jason—”

“What?” he snaps. “What the hell do you want to ask me? What could you ask me that would make _this,_ ” he gestures furiously between them, “better?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce admits, quiet, and for some reason that drains the fury right out of Jason like someone has pulled the plug on him. All that green rage is going swirling, swirling away down the drain, and now he’s just tired. 

Tired, so goddamn tired. 

“Yeah, me neither,” he mutters, and leaves. 

Jason spends some time in the library over the next week, more than he has since he came back. He tears through all the novels he hasn’t read since he was 15, sat in his favorite plush armchair in the back corner, tucked behind a pillar safely out of sight. 

He’d used to hide there for hours, when he was a kid. Somewhere warm and dry and safe, where the books lining the walls had filled every ragged and torn part of him. 

Willis couldn't find him there.

The only time Jason has ever had a library card is when he was with Bruce, and he finally had a permanent address to put on the form. 

He can’t get one now either, of course - still no permanent address, and legally dead. 

It’s strange, and sometimes he likes the way it feels and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he likes being his own ghost, and sometimes he hates it so much he’d punch the mirror in his bathroom until he couldn’t see himself anymore if it wouldn’t slice his knuckles open and stop him from patrolling. 

Jason’s thinking about it when Bruce finds him. 

“No,” Jason says immediately, aghast that his last sanctuary could be invaded after all this time. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Jason,” Bruce tries, but Jason jumps to his feet, hurls the book he’d been reading onto his seat and glares ferociously. 

“I. Said. _No._ ”

“Alfred misses you.”

And isn’t that a dirty trick.

Jason deflates. “Tell him—”

“You can tell him yourself.”

Jason goes back to glaring. “No. I can’t.”

“I want to…” Bruce stops, looks thoughtful. Jason, for some reason, waits. “I want to try and mend things. I know they can’t be fixed entirely.”

Jason considers him. “Yeah. No shit, old man.”

There’s a long moment where they just watch each other, then Bruce says, very quietly, “You were never unloved.”

He can’t even _say_ it, and Jason should be furious, but what comes out is small and broken: “Then why didn’t you stop the man who hurt me?”

Bruce seizes him in a hug, then, and Jason doesn’t have the energy to fight him off. 

“Jason,” Bruce whispers, and Jason tugs his way free of Bruce’s strong grip. 

“I—”

“Jason Todd is Bruce Wayne’s son,” Bruce says seriously, and it takes Jason a moment to even understand what he means. 

Red Hood and Batman are at war. Jason and Bruce don’t have to be. 

“Let me get you a coffee,” Bruce implores, and Jason’s so _tired._

“Okay.”

They sit in the little cafe next to the library. Jason absently traces the line of his batarang scar while Bruce orders a black coffee for him and tea for Jason. 

“Here,” Bruce says, then stops in his tracks when he sees what Jason is doing. 

Jason drops his hand fast, then wonders why he should have to. _Bruce_ did that to him. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Bruce _and_ Batman did that to him. He can’t pry the two apart like Bruce can. 

Bruce sits. “I’m sorry.”

“Kill the Joker.”

Bruce’s mouth snaps shut. They watch each other again. 

“You know why that won’t happen,” Bruce says evenly, and Jason takes a scalding hot sip of his tea and grimaces. 

“Then I don’t know what we’re doing here.”

“You want things to stay this way?” Bruce asks, and now he looks angry, and Jason snaps. 

“ _No,_ ” he hisses. “I wanted _nothing more_ than to come home. I crawled out my own _fucking grave_ calling for you, Bruce. But then I saw someone wearing my uniform and my _murderer_ running loose in the city and it was like I’d never existed at all.”

He’s breathing very fast. His ears are ringing. All he can think is _I’m my own ghost_ on a loop. 

“Jason,” Bruce whispers, horrified, just as small and broken as Jason’s voice had been earlier. 

Jason wants to be cruel, wants to twist the knife even deeper. “You failed as a hero, and you failed as a father, _dad._ ”

Bruce looks like Jason has slapped him, and Jason is sharply, viciously gleeful.

Hurting people is what he’s best at.

“I think we’re done for real, now,” Jason says, draining his tea and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t come looking for me again.”

Jason avoids the diner for almost a month. 

Sometimes he thinks of Bruce carrying his book around, on the off chance he might see him again so he can return it. 

Sometimes he thinks of Bruce calling him _son._

Sometimes he thinks of being twelve, gangly and awkward in the day, but endlessly graceful as he flew at Batman’s side in the night. 

In the end, he walks past the diner just to get the memories to stop. Bruce will have given up on him again. He won’t be there. He _won’t._

Except he is. 

Jason is numb. He goes inside before he can think.

When he sits opposite Bruce, Bruce looks stunned. 

“Jason.”

“Bruce.”

“Would you like something to eat?”

“No,” Jason says. He feels sick enough already. 

Bruce nods, drinks his coffee, doesn’t meet Jason’s eyes. 

“You,” Jason starts, but he doesn’t know what he wants to say. 

Bruce puts his drink down decisively. “I used to speak to you.”

“What?” 

“I would go to your grave and I would speak to you. I would apologize, I would tell you what was happening in the city. I opened a children’s wing in Gotham General in your name. I took your favorite books to your grave and read them to you, sometimes. Every year on your birthday Alfred and I would eat Neapolitan ice cream together. Every year on the anniversary of your death I’d stay out on patrol all night, so no one else would die on my watch.”

Jason stares at him, stricken silent. 

“After that old apartment block blew, I searched through the rubble for hours, trying to find you.”

“I…I left,” Jason manages. His eyes are too wide.

“Tim joined me because he saw I was falling apart without you. He did not _replace_ you.”

Jason keeps staring. 

“ _Nobody_ could _ever_ replace you,” Bruce says, looking him right in the eye. “And now you’re here, alive again by some miracle. I just want you to come home.”

_Miracle,_ Jason thinks, remembering soil, remembering painfully green water, remembering remembering remembering.

_ Home. _

Bruce carrying him to his bedroom when he fell asleep watching a movie. Bandaging up his knee when he scraped it on patrol. Giving him cough medicine when he got sick. Collecting first editions with him. Getting a library card for him. 

“I…” Jason can’t think anymore, he _can’t._ Everything feels like it’s falling apart around him and he has to leave, now. _Now._

Jason stands and flees. He doesn’t look back. 

He throws himself into fight after fight that night, until he’s bleeding and bruised and dizzy. Stumbling back in the direction of his safe house, too tired to use his grapple, he thinks of Bruce. 

Of Batman, gliding through the night. A little red, yellow and green figure soaring beside him. 

Jason’s going to throw up. 

He ends up in an alley, doubled over, breathing hard. His helmet lies at his feet. 

Pain breaks across the back of his head. Hit — someone’s hit him. Who?

He turns, lurching, nausea roiling, and sees a thug with a baseball bat, snarling something about the Red Hood, about revenge, and before Jason can answer Batman drops from the sky and the man is down. 

Jason watches through blurry eyes as Batman makes short work of his would-be-attacker, then turns to him. 

“Hood.”

Jason flinches away, against the wall, when that dark figure steps towards him. 

Batman stops. 

“Jason,” he says softly, and Jason finally bursts into tears then, after what feels like years of buildup. 

He’s hurt and bleeding and broken and crying and all he wants is his dad, and Bruce is there, big and warm and strong, and he’s holding Jason tight, so Jason clings and clings and clings. 

“ _Bruce,_ ” he gasps, and Bruce scoops him up like he’s still 12, and the wind ruffles his hair as they soar up and up. 

  
  


When Jason wakes up, he’s not in the cave. 

He’s in the manor, and he hasn’t been here in so long it almost makes him sick again. 

He rubs his eyes, tries to sit up but grimaces under a wave of nausea. When he turns his head, he’s surprised to see Bruce beside him, at his bedside in a chair. He’s asleep, his head drooping down and to one side. 

Jason shifts and winces at the aches lancing through his body. He _hurts._

His wrist is bandaged, and so is his chest. Nothing feels broken, but his wrist might be sprained. 

“Bruce?” he asks, voice rasping, and Bruce startles awake. 

“Jason,” he says immediately, sitting up straight. “How are you feeling?”

“Like hell,” Jason says, and winces again. “What…?” He’s not sure what to say. _What happened? What are you doing? What am I doing here?_

“Alfred tended to your injuries,” Bruce says. “You slept through the night.”

_Alfred._ It hurts in Jason’s chest, hearing his name. 

“I…” He looks up at the ceiling. “Thank you,” he whispers. 

Bruce pushes his hair back from his forehead, takes his temperature with the back of his hand like Jason’s a child. 

“Of course,” he says. 

Jason blinks up at him, and then he’s crying again. 

“I’m sorry,” he gasps, and Bruce draws away, shocked. “Bruce, I’m sorry.”

“Shh, shh, I know,” Bruce murmurs, soothing, calming. “I am too, Jaylad.”

Jason cries harder, Bruce’s hand still in his hair, then Bruce sits on the side of his bed and keeps on making those quiet, soothing noises until Jason drops back to sleep, exhausted. 

When he wakes up again, Bruce is still there, but he’s awake this time. 

“Feeling better?” he asks, and Jason frowns. 

“Uh, yeah.”

He’s feeling embarrassed. _Mortified_. 

“It’s alright,” Bruce says, like he’s read his mind. “It’s okay, Jason.”

Jason looks at the ceiling again. Bruce blocks his view. 

“Would you like something to eat?”

“Um. Okay.”

“You should be able to walk, now,” Bruce informs him, and Jason slides carefully out of bed. 

The manor hasn’t changed, which, for some reason, makes him shake. Bruce puts an arm around him, lets Jason lean his weight against him, and Jason wants to cry again. 

Downstairs, Alfred is in the kitchen. 

“Master Jason,” he says simply. “Welcome back.”

Jason sits cautiously at the table, looks up at Bruce, who gives him a tiny, tiny smile. 

_Welcome back._

Jason pulls himself together and says, “Thanks, Alfie. Glad to be back.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed!! I can't seem to stop writing fic about Jason?? 
> 
> that apology scene was vaguely inspired by that one scene in rhato #18 (n52)
> 
> as always, kudos and comments are v appreciated <33 let me know what you think!!


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